Supplanted By Facebook Messenger, Beluga Will Stop Swimming On November 11

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Beluga, the slick group messaging app that Facebook acquired back in March, is shutting down. In a post on Beluga’s blog, the company’s original team of three writes that, beginning November 11, you’ll no longer be able to send messages (though you’ll still be able to access old messages until December 15, at which point they’ll all be deleted).

If you’d like to download all of your pods before they get harpooned, you can grab an archive of your account using this tool.

The news doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Facebook launched a standalone Messenger app in August that included much of the functionality of Beluga (in fact, it was built by the same team), and at the time it said it wasn’t clear what Beglua’s future was. Which didn’t exactly bode well for the service.

Beluga first launched in December 2010, created by ex-Googlers Lucy Zhang, Ben Davenport, and Jon Perlow.

From the company blog post:

We’re excited to announce that we just launched the Facebook Messenger app worldwide in 22 languages! If you haven’t used it yet, we hope you’ll give Messenger a try — it has all the great features of Beluga, and it’s available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry.

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We’d like to thank you all for being such enthusiastic and loyal users. We’ll continue to use your feedback to improve Messenger and make messaging your friends easier, faster and more fun.

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CrunchBase

OverviewFacebook is an online social networking service that allows its users to connect with friends and family as well as make new connections. It provides its users with the ability to create a profile, update information, add images, send friend requests, and accept requests from other users. Its features include status update, photo tagging and sharing, and more.
Facebook’s profile structure includes …

OverviewBeluga helps groups of friends stay in touch on the go.
Beluga offers a mobile app and web service that enable simple, instant, and rich group messaging from your phone. Use Beluga to plan a night out or just share updates and photos with your close friends and family. Like SMS, it's instant. Like email, everyone's in on the conversation. Best of all, it's private, so let the real conversations …